ISABEL SEGUÍ

Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues

Women’s Labor in Andean Oppositional Film Production

ABSTRACT This article contextualizes and characterizes production practices in political cin-
ema in Bolivia and Peru between the 1960s and 1990s, reading them as a communitarian en-
deavor that included many more women than official history acknowledges. It also documents
the work of two overshadowed filmmakers—the Bolivian Beatriz Palacios and the Peruvian
María Barea—mainly in their roles as film producers and managers of small producing compa-
nies, but also as directors. In order to effectively incorporate women into Andean cinema his-
tory, I advocate for a nonhierarchical historiographical methodology and the academic
consideration of personal relationships as one of the driving factors in artisanal political pro-
duction cultures. A non-auteurist approach to unearthing Andean women filmmakers is cen-
tral to this revisionist project that aims to shed light on an entire range of women’s labor in
collaborative film production, not only directorial work. KEYWORDS Andean cinema,
Beatriz Palacios, Latin American women filmmakers, María Barea, Ukamau

La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, August . In the privacy of his home, Jorge
Sanjinés, an acclaimed—although non-mainstream—Latin American filmmaker
nearing his eighties, discusses his life partner and producer Beatriz Palacios, who
died in : “She helped me a lot. She gave me time to create peacefully. She
managed all the problems.”1 After this statement, he remains thoughtfully silent.
The question that animates this article, and my research more broadly, is how to
account for the silence that follows these moments of recognition. How do we
understand the historical and political contexts that virtually erased Palacios and
other women like her whose labor was integral to the production of Andean op-
positional cinema between the s and the s?
During my fieldwork, it became clear that women disappear in the transit
from oral records to written histories, which is to say, in the passage from un-
official to official history. Furthermore, most of the published oral testimonies,
such as the excellent work by Julianne Burton-Carvajal, are focused on male di-
rectors, whose points of view, although important, are partial and potentially

Feminist Media Histories, Vol. , Number , pps. –. electronic ISSN -. ©  by the Regents
of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy
or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page,
http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/./fmh.....

11
misleading.2 Histories of directorial achievements also tend to erase the impor-
tance of subaltern members of the crew; as well, these histories can overlook the
work women performed in noncreative roles or oversimplify the gendered
power dynamics that complicated the collaborative project of Andean opposi-
tional filmmaking.3 The realization of this subaltern expunction has made me
prioritize the search for unwritten sources, resulting in many hours of conver-
sations with above- and below-the-line members of the crews and their ex-
panded support network, but also critics, historians, journalists, and activists.
Finding the direct testimony of women who participated in these collaborative
projects and expanding the boundaries of the archive are necessary interven-
tions for a film history that interrogates women’s work in Latin American film
production.4 I have pursued both direct testimonies and personal files to dem-
onstrate that women’s work was central to the political achievements and func-
tional viability of collaborative cinematic projects conducted in the Andes.
This article is a feminist critique of the historicization of Latin American po-
litical cinema. Taking a non-auteurist approach to unearthing Andean women
filmmakers is central to this revisionist project that aims to shed light on an en-
tire range of women’s labor in film production, not only directorial work.5
Moreover, a non-individualistic approach to Andean collaborative cinema
allows us to understand the production context in a more accurate way.
Women participating in these productions did not claim a unique aesthetic or
singular ideological status. Rather than validating their work in relation to their
exceptionality or genius, they worked collectively to forward urgent political
projects. This is not to say that they lacked strong personalities or points of
view, nor that they were not gifted (most of them were enormously talented).
Rather, their contributions were significant because their goal as co-creators was
to enable the emancipatory processes unleashed by their films within specific so-
cial groups—principally the subaltern classes.
A non-auteurist methodology also helps to explain the decolonial practices
of Andean political cinema, which are too commonly read from a
Westernized point of view, a tendency that contradicts both the political aims
of these collaborative projects and their praxis; it often has the undesirable con-
sequence of turning films produced under Third Cinema precepts into second
cinema fungible commodities (art house movies) for Western audiences.6
Conversely, the objective of this type of cinema was to offer all-encompassing
processes of liberation through filmmaking, where the subaltern subjects (indi-
genous peasants, workers, miners, organized housewives, domestic servants,
street children) were both participants and the desired audience. Within this

12 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

context, urban middle-class filmmakers adopted the role of organic intellectuals,
offering their cultural, technological, and (scarce) economic capital to their
allies. And women contributed fundamentally to the political reach of opposi-
tional cinema, from the first stages, such as investigation and fundraising, to the
final phases, such as the evaluation of reception.
This article contextualizes the characteristics of production practices in
oppositional filmmaking in Bolivia and Peru, reading them as communitarian
endeavors that included many more women than official history acknowledges.
It also documents the work of two overshadowed filmmakers, the Bolivian
Beatriz Palacios and the Peruvian María Barea, focusing mainly on their roles
as film producers and managers of small producing companies, and also on their
work as directors. Finally, it advocates for a nonhierarchical historiographical
methodology in order to effectively incorporate women and their collaborative
production practices into Andean cinema history.

OPPOSITIONAL FILMMAKING IN THE ANDES, 1960s–1990s

The production of political films in Latin America is referred to by different

labels, such as militant, revolutionary, third, oppositional, or political intervention
cinema. I have chosen to use the term “oppositional filmmaking,” building on
Julianne Burton-Carvajal’s nomenclature, which highlights a focus on the eman-
cipatory conditions of production and reception of this cinematic practice.7
Moreover, the term “oppositional” allows me to bridge the gap and encompass the
two different historical periods (the s and s, and the s and s)
and the two separate national contexts (Bolivian and Peruvian) that I address.
Due to the transformation of political and economic conditions, the rhetorical
strategies of the films were forced to change. Nevertheless, there were continuities
in the filmmakers’ objectives, which are easily traceable through the persistence of
modes of production, avenues of distribution, and use of political cinema across
the decades and across the permeable Andean border.
The so-called “long s,” a period of common epochal characteristics that
extended into the mid-s, was characterized by a radical cinematographic
militancy founded on the hope that revolutionary political change was within
reach. This optimism was based on a series of successful anti-imperialist events
that took place at a tri-continental level: the Cuban Revolution (), Algerian
independence (), and the American defeat in Vietnam (). What hap-
pened instead of a global revolution, however, was a vicious counterrevolution-
ary attack on a continental level called Operation Condor, implemented in the
s. This plan consisted of a series of intelligence operations coordinated

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among South American dictatorial governments working in close collaboration
with the US government and the CIA. The goal was to stop Latin American
leftist insurgencies in any form, from legitimate governments such as that of
Salvador Allende in Chile to guerrilla movements such as the Montoneros in
Argentina or the Tupamaros in Uruguay.
Operation Condor resulted in widespread atrocities: tens of thousands of
people tortured, killed, disappeared, and illegally imprisoned. As a result of
state-sanctioned terrorism, different strata of society, especially younger genera-
tions who once dreamed of changing the economic, political, and social para-
digm, became demoralized and demobilized. During the s, as an
immediate continuation of political repression, neoliberal economic policies
were imposed continent-wide. The doctrine of the Washington Consensus
subjugated the peoples of Latin America more efficiently than armies had
in the previous decade. Consequently, the possibility of implementing an eco-
nomic and political alternative to capitalism, seemingly promised by earlier,
anti-imperialist successes, seemed to vanish.
Film production faced similar challenges. In the s and s, Latin
American oppositional cinema searched for ways to weaponize cinema, but
from the s onward the revolution was a lost dream, and filmmaking be-
came less partisan and more reflective. But throughout, filmmakers never aban-
doned their political and social orientation, and over this forty-year period,
urban middle-class filmmakers continued to make films with and for the subal-
tern groups.
Notwithstanding the enormous political differences and the diverse de-
velopments in Bolivia’s and Peru’s film industries during this period, both
nation-states share a common cultural Andean substratum that stems from
their pre-Hispanic heritage and from their colonial past.8 For this reason,
and recognizing that “Andean cinema” is not a well-established category, I
am using the term “Andean oppositional filmmaking” to denominate the
collaborative nature of filmmakers and their production practices. A distinct
advantage of this conceptualization is that it not only acknowledges the
shared physical and cultural landscape but also speaks to a transnational cir-
cuit of cinema practitioners and practices between Bolivia and Peru, includ-
ing the pan-Andean ideas and feelings that nurtured these exchanges. This
circulation is still in place and needs to be further researched, both historically
and contemporarily.9
Probably the most programmatically pan-Andean collective, the Bolivian
Ukamau (Aymara for “so it is”) group, began its journey in the long s.

14 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

They developed a groundbreaking type of film practice, self-defined as cine junto
al pueblo (cinema with the people).10 Indigenous peasants and miners became
the collective protagonists of the films, while the popular classes were the target
audiences instead of the traditional demographic, the urban middle classes. This
shift in audience, along with their desire to decolonize cinema, forced the film-
makers to change both film language and production culture. The different
stages of Ukamau’s filmic theory and practice show the necessary evolution of
their cinematic methodology, which was forced to adapt to changing historical
conditions. This transformation is clear in how Ukamau’s rhetorical tone
shifted over time, a process that can be traced in the film titles themselves: from
the open militancy of the s and s (Blood of the Condor [Yawar Mallku,
], The Courage of the People [El coraje del pueblo, ], The Principal
Enemy [El enemigo principal, ], Get Out of Here [Fuera de aquí, ]) to
a more allegorical mode characteristic of the end of the s and the s
(The Clandestine Nation [La nación clandestina, ], To Hear the Birds
Singing [Para recibir el canto de los pájaros, ]).
The second groups of filmmakers that I am going to address here, the
Peruvian Chaski (Quechua for “messenger”) and Warmi (Quechua for
“woman”), began their journey in the s. Although they shared with
Ukamau the programmatic aim of giving voice to the voiceless, their rhetorical
strategies could not rely on the militant style of the previous period. For in-
stance, Ukamau’s films of the s do not have individual protagonists or
stars. Instead, the narratives are driven collectively by the masses of peasants or
miners (as a formal consequence, close-ups are avoided, takes are longer, and the
angles wider in order to encompass the collective action). Conversely, in
Chaski’s films of the s, Gregorio () and Juliana (), and Warmi’s
films of the s, Antuca () and Daughters of War (Hijas de la
Violencia, ), representing collective identity is still important, but the story-
telling structure revolves around individual protagonists. Additionally, the over-
all tone, despite being socially critical, is not as overtly political. Oppositional
filmmaking during this period, then, shared overlapping political concerns and
production and distribution practices, but was marked by distinct aesthetics and
styles.

ARTISANAL AND PRECARIOUS PRODUCTION MODE

Julianne Burton-Carvajal notes that in Latin American oppositional filmmaking,

the mode of production emphasized “use value” versus “exchange value,” and its pro-
cedures integrated all levels of the creative process instead of compartmentalizing

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them into discrete areas. As for the means of production, these cinematic pro-
cesses did not require large amounts of capital, expensive or complex infrastruc-
ture, equipment, studio sets, professional actors, or screenwriters. Moreover, the
intended audience was not preeminently the urban middle class, but subaltern
groups whose active participation was deliberately solicited.11 I would add to
Burton-Carvajal’s description that, in this context, the lack of financial resour-
ces forced the whole system of production to be grounded in the mutual help
guaranteed by a community of filmmakers and a wider support network.
The film projects were often carried out by tiny independent production
enterprises with small crews of between three and twenty people. These out-
fits opportunistically took the legal form of a company, a cooperative, or a
foundation depending on the legal frameworks that best favored their sur-
vival.12 As for the support of state institutions, some filmmakers could work
successfully under the auspices of precarious public organisms such as the ICB
(Cinematographic Bolivian Institute) or the SINAMOS (Peruvian National
System for Social Mobilization). Coproductions with public or private foreign
entities were also sought. For instance, the generous support provided by the
ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry) facilitated the postpro-
duction of fundamental Andean movies such as Blood of the Condor (),
I Am a Man (Runan Caycu, ), and Where the Condors Are Born
(Kuntur Wachana, ). Since the s, with the rise of international
cooperation for development, European NGOs have become a frequent
source of funding.
In these fluid and often precarious production contexts, the line between
above- and below-the-line crew members was blurred. Jorge Sanjinés, founder
of the Ukamau group, in addition to being the director of the films was also the
driver and did any required physical tasks without hesitation, as did other re-
nowned directors such as Luis Figueroa and Federico García Hurtado. Crew
members were neither unionized nor had their wages regulated according to any
official wage scale. In general, it was more common that they did not charge for
their work or charged amounts that did not truly reflect the hours they devoted
to the projects. Payments were made later if there were any profits. Payment to
the indigenous peasants, however, was prioritized. Their presence was often in-
dispensable although securing their cooperation was never easy, requiring exten-
sive negotiation and, usually, guaranteed compensation. As for the crew, the
working hours were endless, primarily because members of the team had to take
care of not only filming but also the logistics of daily survival. They often
worked in remote communities where local food markets were nonexistent,

16 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

and where peasant communities who hosted them did not have a surplus to sell,
or even if they did, might choose not to.
The persistent lack of money, equipment, and supplies (especially film stock)
was a constant threat to almost every production. As a result, crew members
needed to be highly committed to each project. Economic gain was not the ob-
jective. On the contrary, filmmakers often pawned, sold, or mortgaged their as-
sets to finance projects for which there was little hope of recovering their
investment. Additionally, they were often subject to political repression such as
detention (as with Beatriz Palacios, Antonio Eguino, and Federico García
Hurtado) or exile (Jorge Sanjinés, Beatriz Palacios, Mario Arrieta, and
Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, among others).
A collaborative cinema was produced in this context not only because there
was a political intention behind this labor structure, but also because it was the
only possible way to make films. Without the total commitment and voluntary
work of those involved at all levels, then, the films would not exist. However, it
is also not possible to claim that a purely horizontal collaborative cinema was
being implemented. Although these groups were intended to be emancipatory,
or at least to create an emancipatory cinema, their structure still mirrored soci-
ety at large, with charismatic leaders, internal hierarchies, and complex power
relations within the crews that derived from broader social structures of colonial
and patriarchal domination.

WOMEN’S WORK IN ANDEAN OPPOSITIONAL CINEMA

Since Andean oppositional cinema productions were not part of a regulated sys-
tem, it is not possible to develop closed categories of production labor, as can be
done in more industrialized systems. What can be said is that some tasks were
feminized (for instance production management, casting, continuity, market-
ing, and distribution), although these tasks could have been carried out equally
well by men. In general, the lack of structures forced all participants in the pro-
duction to multitask with flexibility. But even so, it is possible to establish pat-
terns, and above all—and this is one of the objectives of this article—to start
naming unacknowledged production tasks commonly performed by women
that have hovered under the historiographic radar.
Rather than conceiving of crew members as operating in isolation, it is nec-
essary to regard them as part of a broad mutual aid and solidarity network out-
side of any institutional context. The systems that facilitated film production
were based on personal relationships of friendship or kinship. And within these
networks, the heterosexual couple had a primary role that has so far been

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overlooked. In visualizing a map of the bonds of affinity, friendship, love, and
sex that trace the foundations of Latin American oppositional cinema, the het-
erosexual couple can often be found at the center. Additionally, already complex
familial, social, and national networks were further complicated by the advent
of dictatorships that forced many filmmakers to go into exile. With these dis-
placements, alliances and loving exchanges became transnational (and in some
instances stretched thin or broken).
Personal relationships, regarded as a sensitive subject, have traditionally been
considered only fit for gossip and are often overlooked in scholarly work on the
history of Latin American film. However, in the context of its precarious mode
of production, they cannot be a secondary consideration. Rather, they were the
cornerstone of an artisanal film’s feasibility. Perhaps in other modes of produc-
tion with more stable industrial and financial structures, personal bonds of love,
friendship, or kinship do not affect production in the same way. However, in
the case of Latin American oppositional cinema, they often had a direct impact
on production. Emotions such as companionship, enthusiasm, and generosity
could turn an impossible film project into a great success. Conversely, jealousy,
betrayal, or abuse could turn a utopian project into a painful human
experience.13
As for the women who participated in the projects with their partners, it is
commonly assumed that they performed auxiliary labor, offering the “natural”
support that “every” wife should give to her husband in whatever walk of life.
Consequently, the collaborative and creative work performed by these women,
understood as a part of their domestic obligation, has been rendered invisible.
The Quechua-language film Blood of the Condor—the best known and most
successful Andean political film—is paradigmatic of this process of exclusion,
and exemplifies the implications of marital contributions to Andean opposi-
tional filmmaking.
Blood of the Condor is a docu-fiction film that denounces real historical
events, namely the sterilization without consent of indigenous Bolivian women
by members of the US Peace Corps. As a militant film, Blood of the Condor was
tremendously effective; as a direct consequence of its exhibition, the Peace
Corps was expelled from the country for twenty years. It was also very successful
artistically, quickly becoming part of the canon of the New Latin American
cinema. Blood of the Condor has entered official cinema history as the work of
a brilliant auteur named Jorge Sanjinés. Yet in the testimonies of its production,
including ones from Sanjinés himself, it is apparent that the tremendously chal-
lenging realization of the film was entirely collective and would have been

18 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

impossible without the risky and enthusiastic contributions of all the partici-
pants. The production’s collaborative nature was noted by Antonio Eguino, the
cinematographer, who in his memoir described the Ukamau group as a
“tribe.”14 Included in the crew who traveled to the filming location (the little
hamlet of Kaata in the Kallawaya region) were at least three married couples
and their children. Only the names of the male halves of these couples have
entered history, although their wives appear in the credits. Their names are
Consuelo Saavedra, Gladys de Rada, and Danielle Caillet.
Consuelo Saavedra was a Chilean artist who was married to the director,
Jorge Sanjinés, and traveled to the shoot with their three children. She was also
a dynamic catalyst within the group. Eguino, who knew Sanjinés from his child-
hood, attributes Sanjinés’s early politicization to her influence.15 In Blood of the
Condor she is credited as an assistant director, although according to Eguino her
tasks far exceeded that role. She also took care of the food logistics in a place
where there were neither roads nor a stable market nor suppliers of any kind;
under such challenges, feeding each day a group of fifteen people, including
small children, was a critical task.16
The wife of producer Ricardo Rada was also in Kaata. While named both in
the credits and in Eguino’s book as Gladys de Rada, her actual surname remains
unknown.17 According to the credits, she worked as the production assistant,
but she also acted as an on-set translator of Quechua. She and her husband were
the only crew members who spoke the local language, translation skills that
were crucial during filming in the Quechua-speaking region.
Danielle Caillet, Eguino’s French-born wife, was the third woman who
moved to Kaata, bringing with her their one-year-old son. Besides taking on the
role of an American health worker in the film (reportedly because she looked
like a gringa), she also maintained continuity and took still photos of the pro-
duction. She would go on to become a well-known photographer, sculptor,
filmmaker, and video maker. Her  film Warmi (Woman) is a pioneering
work of Bolivian feminist nonfiction, which portrays the diversity of women’s
life in the country. Later in the decade she theorized the need for a women’s
cinema in Bolivia in her article “La importancia de un cine llamado
Potencial-Mujer” (For a Cinema Called Woman-Potential). In it she details a
programmatic interest in teaching cinema techniques and transferring audiovi-
sual technology to Aymara and Quechua peasants and working-class women.
She also argues that these groups could use such knowledge and equipment to
overcome their economic and gender-based exploitation, regarding cinema as a
tool to enhance women’s contribution to the country’s development.18

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 Danielle Caillet performing the role of the American health worker in Blood
FIGURE 1.
of the Condor (Yawar Mallku, Ukamau group), .

It is worth noting that Eguino credits the social structure of the brotherhood
or tribe for making the film, which highlights the communitarian aspect of the
production. Oscar Soria had the original idea for the story and wrote the scenario,
and Eguino was responsible for fundraising, mainly through crowdfunding among
their acquaintances. However, Eguino also makes clear that the production was
facilitated by the connections forged by the women on the crew; the friendship
between Saavedra and the Chileans Verónica Cereceda and Gabriel Martínez
took Ukamau to the Kallawaya region, which finally became the film location.19
Within this film “tribe,” all of the crew members in Kaata and La Paz contributed
their labor, ingenuity, and creativity to the project, as Eguino observed:
The filming of Blood of the Condor was a complete experience. It had several
virtues. The main thing was that we were a very united group with a single
conviction: making the film. The group fulfilled the motto “one for all, all for
one.” When we finished filming in Kaata, we did not have enough money to
pay the people we had hired in the last scenes. Then Jorge [Sanjinés] spoke
with the communards and said: “I am going to stay as a pledge until we get
money to pay you.” The whole crew returned to La Paz to get the money that
was missing. In La Paz, we started looking for money, and in the end, Danielle
[Caillet] proposed: “We will pawn our jewels.” She, with the other women of
the crew, placed in a bag their rings, necklaces, and earrings, and we took them
to the pawnshop. With the obtained money, we “rescued” Jorge.20

20 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

Despite the communitarian ethos, it is also evident from Eguino’s anecdote that
the “tribal” leader was the charismatic Sanjinés, who offered to remain as collat-
eral because he thought he was the group’s most valuable asset, then was saved
by the women in the group, who pawned their jewels to pay off the debt and
reclaim him. In recognizing their role in rescuing Sanjinés, Eguino calls them
“the women of the crew” for the first time in his narrative, finally acknowledg-
ing their contributions to the production. As cultural artifacts, Andean political
films were the result of complex processes carried out by communities of work-
ers and facilitated by extensive personal support networks. Any exclusively tex-
tual analysis of these movies that leads to the attribution of their authorship to a
single individual, the director, commits an error of interpretation.

HUSBAND-DIRECTORS AND WIFE-PRODUCERS

Another social formation has proved to be a successful mode for filmmaking in

challenging production contexts: a partnership between a female producer and
a male director. In these cases, the roles often conform to a pattern in which the
man is the artist and the woman is the executor. Although their workloads are
similar, the distribution of power is unequal, and the social and cultural capital
(awards, tributes, a place in history) resulting from the labor of both parties
accrues solely to the male director.
This type of partnership is common in independent, artisanal modes of pro-
duction. Often the woman offers to act as her partner’s producer; in the follow-
ing cases, the Bolivian Beatriz Palacios (Jorge Sanjinés’s second wife) and the
Peruvian María Barea were very young when they started to work with their
respective partners.21 Since the beginning, they extended personal and emo-
tional ties into work and political alliances. However, it cannot be ignored that
both Sanjinés and Luis Figueroa, Barea’s husband, were already recognized
personalities in their countries, holding a social power that the young women
lacked. In consequence, the overall position of Palacios and Barea in these labor
relations, at least at the beginning, was one of subordination, although voluntar-
ily assumed due to the envisioned possibility of fulfilling their political and
artistic interests via a cinematic career.
Despite some clear differences, the “boss-secretary relationship” in the
Hollywood studio era described by Erin Hill has many similarities with the
Latin American husband-director/wife-producer relationship. In ascribing credit
to the hidden labor of the studio secretary, Hill coined the concept “creative
service” to describe a series of roles “cohering around their most essential shared
function: serving creative work by subtracting all noncreative work from the

Seguí | Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues 21

process.” She further affirms that “workers in such roles aid the creative process
by serving as a repository for all its unappealing tasks, details, and emotions.”22
The wife-producer met this same function in Andean oppositional cinema.
The reason why women like Palacios and Barea agreed to enact creative serv-
ices without expecting any recognition can be attributed to many factors, al-
though both had a strong sense of duty and loyalty to their political causes. In
the case of Palacios, who had been a communist militant since adolescence,
she was an ardent supporter of the anti-imperialist struggle and the liberation of
the Bolivian people. She was also compensated at a personal and professional
level by a position of authority in the Ukamau group. For her part, Barea felt
a more general need to contribute to the transformation of Peruvian society by
eliminating inequality, racism, classism, and machismo. She persistently rejected
masculinized power structures, in part by founding and leading the women’s
group Warmi, dedicated to giving voice to subaltern Peruvian women.
However, as we shall see, this empowerment was not accompanied by public
recognition.

BEATRIZ PALACIOS

Beatriz Palacios (b. Oruro, Bolivia, ca. , d. Havana, ) studied journal-
ism in Cuba and lived and worked there for most of her youthful years.23 She
met Sanjinés in Havana in , where he was working on postproduction for
The Principal Enemy at ICAIC. They fell in love and immediately mingled
their labor and political agendas. Their main goal was to return to Bolivia and
continue making films in their country. Hugo Banzer’s dictatorship, however,
made this desired return impossible until . In the meantime, they decided
to work in Ecuador, a country with a shared Andean culture, where they could
make films with the indigenous peasants without literally risking their lives.
Over a three-year period, from  to , they made Get Out of Here, a film
that denounces the penetration of Western mining corporations in Andean ter-
ritory under the guise of evangelic Christian groups. This was Palacios’s first
filmmaking experience; she started as the assistant producer and ended up being
the head of production, cowriter, and coeditor.
The writer, filmmaker, and historian Alfonso Gumucio Dagron documents
the challenges faced during the production of Get Out of Here in his book
Diario Ecuatoriano. Cuaderno de Rodaje (Ecuadorian Diary: Filming
Notebook).24 The book is a transcription of the diary he kept while on location
in Ecuador during the first shoot for the film in . In addition to the diary,
the book’s contents include interviews with members of the different crews

22 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

 Beatriz Palacios (center) organizes the shooting of a scene for Get Out
FIGURE 2.
of Here (Fuera de Aquí, Ukamau group), , in Ecuador in . Photo by
Cristobal Corral.

compiled by the editors. In one of these, Erika Hanekamp (a German woman

who participated in the second shoot and has remained in Quito up until to-
day) describes Palacios as the driving force behind the production: “She was the
first one to get up in the morning, and the last one to go to bed. She was in-
volved in everything. She did everything. She was the organizer.”25
This drive defined Palacios’s career and relationship with Sanjinés. During
the almost thirty years of their relationship, Palacios took care of all the tasks
that guaranteed the day-to-day running of the film productions, the office, and
their home. She was also—as are the secretaries to the producers or the assis-
tants to the directors in Hollywood—a filter between Sanjinés and the world.
To reach him, you first had to gain Palacios’s approval. But unlike a
Hollywood secretary, she was also an executive who had significant power over
the production of Sanjinés’s films. He delegated much of the decision making
to her out of convenience, but also absolute trust. It was a symbiotic relation-
ship that benefited both partners: he remained in the ivory tower, abandoning
it only when necessary, and she ran Ukamau with authority.26
Though there has not been consistent recognition of her contribution to
Ukamau’s project in the academic literature, in the day-to-day operations her
significance was widely recognized in Bolivia and abroad. She became essential
to Ukamau’s production almost from the moment of her incorporation into
the group in . After returning to Bolivia in , she codirected with
Sanjinés the documentary Banners of Dawn (Las banderas del amanecer,
). Afterward she produced the remarkable The Clandestine Nation (La
nación clandestina, ), which received the Best Film Award at San
Sebastian Film Festival, followed by the To Hear the Birds Sing (Para recibir el

Seguí | Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues 23

canto de los pájaros, ) and The Children of the Last Garden (Los hijos del
ultimo jardín, ).
Palacios suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and died suddenly in . In
the years before her death she had been working on a personal project called
Land without Evil (Tierra sin mal), which had already been granted state fund-
ing. Based on a detailed weekly shooting schedule kept in the Ukamau
Foundation’s archive, the casting was completed, and the preproduction had
been finished.27 But before the filming could begin—with Sanjinés ready to act
as her assistant for the first time—she took ill with an outbreak of her chronic
disease and had to postpone it. In the end, Sanjinés’s film The Children of the
Last Garden was made with funds that had been originally allocated to her proj-
ect. For this film, Palacios again acted as a producer and also directed some of
the most complicated scenes of the movie, which were shot in a direct cinema
fashion that mixed the actors with real street mobilizations. Before the film was
released, Palacios passed away unexpectedly while traveling to Cuba to receive
medical treatment.
Palacios’s influence on Andean oppositional cinema cannot be understated.
Her commitment to weaponizing film as an instrument of communication and
education helped radicalize Ukamau’s scope, primarily in relation to dissemi-
nating the collective’s work through noncommercial circuits. The work of the
Ukamau group was centered on denouncing the causes of exploitation, expos-
ing US imperialism, and revealing alliances between local oligarchies and the
empire. To evaluate the impact of Ukamau films on their target audiences, she
undertook systematic audience research work, a unique phenomenon in the
New Latin American cinema, as far as I know. She was also an active member
of different associations, including the Bolivian New Film and Video
Movement and the New Latin American Cinema Foundation in Havana, and
the representative in Bolivia of the International School of Film and Television
of San Antonio de los Baños. During her life, and posthumously, she received
awards for her work in Bolivia and Cuba. Although scarce, the reevaluation of
Palacios’s contributions to Bolivian cinema are ongoing. For example, in ,
Sergio Estrada released the documentary Beatriz with the People (Beatriz junto
al pueblo), composed of testimonies from her friends and acquaintances—
filmmakers, cultural managers, union leaders.
Palacios’s political commitments were established long before she met her
husband, but her role as his partner-producer overshadowed the parameters of
her influence on his work and on the wider project of “cinema with the people.”
Like other women who have had to find ways to negotiate the relationship

24 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

 Beatriz Palacios shooting Banners of Dawn (Las banderas
FIGURE 3.
del amanecer, dir. Beatriz Palacios and Jorge Sanjinés), .

between public and private life, her partnership with Sanjinés united her life and
her politics in an indissoluble way, but it came at great personal cost. Her friend,
the filmmaker Liliana de la Quintana, notes that her intertwined political and
work priorities prevented Palacios from taking care of herself the way she should
have, something that other comrade filmmakers, such as Raquel Romero and
Eduardo López Zavala, also highlight in their remembrances.28
Quintana underscores as well the fact that Palacios consciously opted not to
have children, knowing that motherhood would occupy time and energy she
needed for her militant cinema projects. As a political figure who faced exile or
imprisonment, motherhood would have also made her more vulnerable as a
target.29 This voluntary renunciation, which frequently arises in conversations
about Palacios, especially with those who knew her, resonates as a powerful
metaphor for the pyrrhic victory of cinematic success—for the ways that both
everyday life and historical reputation are circumscribed by traditional gender
roles and the difficult choices working women must contend with in order to
balance public and private commitments. Palacios is perhaps an extreme exam-
ple, but her life and work can be read as a pattern of the motivations, sacrifices,
and most of all contributions of women to Andean and Latin American

Seguí | Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues 25

oppositional filmmaking in this period. Her career can also be understood in
more complexity in relation to how it was both organized and overshadowed
by the labor structure of the wife-producer/husband-director partnership.

MARÍA BAREA

The case of the Peruvian María Barea (b. Chancay, Peru, ) shares certain
features with Palacios but is also substantially different.30 Like Palacios, Barea
entered into film work through her relationship with an older man, the
Peruvian filmmaker Luis Figueroa, a member of the École de Cuzco.31 Other
founding members of this cinematic group were Eulogio Nishiyama, César
Villanueva, and the brothers Manuel and Victor Chambi. These friends, the
children of the indigenist cultural elite of Cusco, were pioneers in Andean arti-
sanal cinema production. They began their filmmaking careers in the early
s with a series of remarkable short ethnographic documentaries, and in
 they released Kukuli (), the first feature film produced in the
Quechua language.
Luis Figueroa and Manuel Chambi were based in Lima when Barea met
them in . She was a young widow and new mother (her son had been born
after her husband’s death). Her creative passion was theater, but soon after the
beginning of her relationship with Figueroa, she started to collaborate on his
cinematographic projects as assistant director and producer. The s were
Figueroa’s most prolific years as a filmmaker, undoubtedly thanks to his per-
sonal and working association with Barea.32 They finished two feature films to-
gether, The Starving Dogs (Los perros hambrientos, ) and Festival of Blood
(Yawar Fiesta, ), literary adaptations of works by Ciro Alegría and Jose
María Arguedas respectively. Barea and Figueroa also worked on one documen-
tary feature film, Chieraq’e: Ritual Battle (Chieraq’e. Batalla Ritual, ), and
two short documentaries, The Kingdom of the Mochicas (El reino de los mochicas,
) and The Strapper (El cargador, ).
Barea’s first experience in filmmaking was as a production assistant on the
Ukamau project The Principal Enemy (El enemigo principal, ). Members of
the Bolivian group (Sanjinés, Arrieta, Saavedra, Oscar Zambrano) carried out
the production, which was shot in Peru in . They worked in close collabo-
ration with the aforementioned members of the Cusco School and other youn-
ger Peruvians such as Barea, Jorge Vignati, Fausto Espinoza, and Efraín Fuentes,
and their experience constitutes a clear example of a transnational pan-Andean
cinematic project. As another example of these transnational connections,

26 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

Figueroa introduced Barea to Sanjinés in Lima and, according to her, the
Bolivian offered her a job as a production assistant on the movie because he ap-
preciated her qualities as a young, responsible, and enthusiastic person.
Indeed, Barea was organized, intelligent, and knowledgeable about their
working environment. She was also an excellent mediator and eager to learn.
Like Palacios’s association with Sanjinés, during Barea’s relationship with
Figueroa she assumed all the “creative service” tasks associated with the pro-
ducers of low-budget films: fundraising, preproduction, casting, shooting logis-
tics, contact with laboratories abroad, management of (scarce) copies,
distribution, sales. The overall organizational, clerical, and communications
tasks fell on her shoulders. Moreover, she took responsibility for what were tra-
ditionally considered “purely creative” tasks. According to Barea, Figueroa was
very talented, but he was a dreamer, a puer aeternus. It was her job to work with
him until his ideas crystallized into realizable material for making films.
Although she received no credit, she participated in writing the scripts for
The Starving Dogs and Festival of Blood, and after their separation in , he
never finished another major film project. Conversely, their separation was the
start of a new career path for Barea. In  she directed her first film, Women
of El Planeta (Mujeres de El Planeta, ), a documentary about a women’s or-
ganization in a slum of Lima and its leader, Rosa Dueñas. The film showcases
the political activities and cultural practices of women of excluded social groups;
its testimonial filming style, which includes reenactments, directly elicits the
lives of these marginalized women. Barea’s short documentary was part of a
global project called As Women See It, a series commissioned by the German
producer Pierre Hoffman, and it won an award at the Leipzig film festival.
Barea’s next film was Miss Universe in Peru (Miss Universo en el Perú,
), the first project undertaken by the Chaski group. Chaski was a film
collective founded in  by Barea, Alejandro Legaspi, Fernando Espinosa
(Barea’s partner at the time), Stephan Kaspar, and Fernando Barreto.
Although a founding member, Barea left this group after three years and two
movies due to irreconcilable differences regarding project management and
the allocation of power within the group she helped organize. Her reasons for
abandoning the group have not yet been heard, and the scant historical
record on the Chaski group maintains a narrative about the collective devel-
oped by the two founders who remained in the group and kept its name,
Legaspi and Kaspar. According to this dominant discourse, one of the main
goals of the group was “to avoid replicating hierarchical labor structures such

Seguí | Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues 27

FIGURE 4. María Barea (left) and Alejandro Legaspi (pointing) during the filming of
Women of El Planeta (Mujeres de El Planeta, dir. María Barea), .

as those that exist in mainstream film production. The collective aims at a

horizontal and collaborative workflow between the members of the group, as
well as the group and its film subjects.”33 Yet Barea’s experience in Chaski
represents an opposite reality, one in which the ideals of equitable workflow
practices and an internal production democracy were not upheld by the male
members of the group.
The case of the collective’s first film, Miss Universe in Peru, illustrates how
contradictions between political rhetoric and organizational structures emerged
during production. Barea’s original idea for the film involved comparing two
ideologically opposed events that were to take place simultaneously in Lima in
July : the Miss Universe contest and the th National Congress of the
Peruvian Confederation of Peasants (CCP). She proposed the idea to her
Chaski colleagues, who were interested and encouraged her to write the script.
Funding was secured thanks to Barea’s reputation as director of Women of El
Planeta, which had been successful abroad. At that time, she was the only mem-
ber of the group with directing experience. But when the time came to edit the
film, something unexpected happened. In her words:
At the time of the editing, they decided “democratically” that I was not going
to enter the editing room. Alejandro [Legaspi] and Fernando [Espinosa]

28 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

 appointed themselves for the task. Macho stuff. I should have been in on the
editing, because the idea was mine and I had planned everything. In Chaski, I
understood what is Machismo-Leninismo.34
Barea’s play on words, replacing “Marxism” with “machismo,” was a common
joke among women in leftist groups, political parties, unions, and in this case
film groups that mocked familiar patterns of patriarchal behavior exhibited by
their otherwise radical compañeros. After being blocked from editing her own
film, and during the period she remained in Chaski, she was forced to revert to
a more subservient part in the group’s hierarchy. She was effectively relegated to
the role of creative assistant, pushed into the more typically “feminine” labor of
artisanal film producer.
As the producer of the subsequent Chaski movie, Gregorio (), Barea was
in charge of casting, which she remembers as particularly challenging because the
film’s subject was street children and nonprofessional actors would perform most
of the roles. For the central role they needed a slum boy from Lima who spoke
Quechua, but many children had learned not to admit their fluency in the indig-
enous language to avoid racism. Barea took responsibility for this difficult task,
which required a lot of intuition, capacity for mediation, and emotional labor,
and which typifies the work women often perform in collaborative enterprises.
According to Erin Hill, casting is a feminized type of labor for various reasons:
the clerical-organizational components of the work, the emotional aspects attri-
buted to women in an essentialist way (instinct, emotional intelligence, and
intuition versus reason, intellect, and logic), and the vital importance of commu-
nication skills. Basically, a casting director must show proficiency in emotional
labor and service.35 In this role, Barea spent months visiting schools on the out-
skirts of Lima until she found the right protagonist. Even so, and in spite of her
responsibilities, the final decisions about casting were not hers. Barea also re-
members with displeasure other casting decisions she opposed, for instance
when the male members of the group decided that the role of Gregorio’s
mother should be performed by a beautiful actress with sex appeal. For her,
it was an unfortunate commercial and patriarchal concession; however, her
voice was not heard, and in the end, the canonically pretty Vetzy Pérez
Palma was chosen.
After the success of Gregorio, thanks to the box office revenues and the sales
of the film, the Chaski group grew very quickly into a production company
with dozens of employees. This overambitious tack was criticized by Barea, who
saw it as unsustainable, a critique that proved to be true not too many years

Seguí | Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues 29

later. Moreover, as she explained me in an interview, for her and her family’s
stability and well-being, she decided to split up with Fernando Espinosa. And
because disagreements regarding the management model and personal issues
were always intertwined, her work situation became likewise untenable, and she
abandoned the Chaski group in .
In  Barea founded the Warmi group with Amelia (Micha) Torres
and Marilú Pérez Goicoechea, both of whom quit Chaski for reasons they
described as burnout. Warmi was the first collaborative group of women
filmmakers in Peru, and beginning in the early s they developed new
cinematic projects alongside the organization of Peru’s domestic workers.36
They made the video documentary Because I Wanted to Study (Porque
quería estudiar, ) and the docu-fiction film Antuca (), a feature
shot in mm. Antuca should have premiered in , but that same year,
Decree no. , for the Promotion of the Cinematographic Industry was
abolished. Consequently, the Peruvian government would no longer guar-
antee the exhibition of all national films, and Antuca never enjoyed theat-
rical circulation. In  Warmi finished their last major project,
Daughters of the War (Hijas de la violencia), featuring members of girl
gangs in Ayacucho, about the devastating consequences of the internal
conflict between Shining Path and the Peruvian army in the lives of the
children of the city.
Examining the biography and filmography of María Barea, inextricably
linked as she is to the history of collective film practices, allows us to understand
the parameters of Peruvian oppositional cinema. Barea was a pivotal figure dur-
ing this period, involved in most of the developments that characterize the op-
positional mode of cinematic production (Sanjinés in Peru, Luis Figueroa,
Chaski, Warmi). But today her contributions are practically forgotten despite
the remarkable collaborative film projects that she developed with different
groups of subaltern women (organized housewives, domestic workers, street
gang girls). Lacking the symbolic or cultural capital that accrued to her male col-
laborators such as Figueroa, Legaspi, Kaspar, and Vignati—who are, beyond dis-
pute, worthy members of the Peruvian cinematic canon—Barea has ended up a
hidden face of Andean oppositional cinema. Like so many other women work-
ing in film, her work is long overdue for critical and historical reevaluation. But
women’s stories do not conform to established patterns, frequently lacking as
they do appealing straightforward narrative arcs of artistic or political success.
On the contrary, and much more often, their stories provide evidence of the
constraints imposed by preexistent social and cultural power structures and

30 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

 María Barea and her son, Horacio Faudella, during the filming of Antuca
FIGURE 5.
(Warmi group), .

point to the complexity, perhaps even the impossibility, of perfect filmic collab-
orative endeavors.

ACKNOWLEDGING WOMEN, HISTORICIZING COMPLEXITY IN ANDEAN

OPPOSITIONAL PRODUCTION PRACTICES

Beyond Beatriz Palacios and María Barea, many other women working in the
production cultures of Andean oppositional cinema remain to be considered.
The need to render women’s labor visible seems clear and straightforward, yet

Seguí | Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues 31

the task remains tricky because even after unearthing one overshadowed film-
maker, that new history will inevitably point to many other women whose work
remains hidden behind the wall of gendered production practices and official
histories. In the case of Palacios, she had numerous assistants working with her
in different roles. Consequently, to thoroughly and coherently assess Ukamau’s
emancipatory scope, it would be necessary to pay attention to different versions
of the group’s history as expressed by her collaborators, some of whom can in-
deed be traced and named, such as Consuelo Lozano and Patricia Suárez.
To unpack the politics and poetics of Andean oppositional cinema, it is nec-
essary to delve into the complexities and power structures of established practi-
ces and processes, which requires a committed focus on gender issues. To that
end, we should lose the fear of telling stories of failed or imperfect experiences.
Pure successes are scarce in collaborative political cinema, so to focus on solo,
auteurist-driven, celebratory narratives ignores the complexity and the conflict
of oppositional practice. Such idealized narratives erase the richness of collabo-
rative cinema and the lessons of its films and history. Historiographic rigor is
necessary to emancipate New Latin American cinema studies from the deform-
ing lens of auteurism, a too-common approach and an artifact of critical and
historical gender bias. For example, the usual attribution of Ukamau’s films to
Jorge Sanjinés is not done explicitly, but by default, omission, generalization.
The actual cinematographic practice of Ukamau is ignored, the different
groups responsible for the filmmaking are not acknowledged, and instead
the umbrella brand “Sanjinés” overshadows complex and contested produc-
tion processes.
Scholarly work must adapt to the realities it describes. Committing to a rhi-
zomatic model of cinema history writing is needed especially to address nonhi-
erarchical practices such as Andean oppositional cinema. I accept my share of
responsibility in this situation. I also once narrated the story of Ukamau in a
way that highlighted Sanjinés as auteur.37 But just as these filmmakers, includ-
ing the directors, went through challenging processes of inner decolonization, it
is now the turn of scholars and critics to make a similar journey. I would suggest
a commitment to fieldwork and investment in new approaches to production
cultures, like the use of methodologies that help foreground forms of creative
labor hitherto undervalued and unexamined, such as care and service. It is cru-
cial to realize that without emotional labor and creative service, low-budget ar-
tisanal films—the majority of films produced in countries without an industrial
structure—would not be possible. Women’s creativity, resourcefulness, and care
underpin these alternative production models. Acknowledging the centrality of

32 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

their forms of labor will invigorate the field of Latin American film studies with
new, more complex, and more accurate historical accounts.

I SABEL S EGUÍ is a PhD student in the Department of Film Studies of the University of St Andrews in
Scotland. She is about to finish her dissertation, “Andean Women’s Oppositional Filmmaking: On/
Off-Screen Practices and Politics.” She has published in different peer-reviewed journals in Europe and
Latin America, mostly about Andean cinematic collectives and testimonial filmic practices by indige-
nous and working-class women from Bolivia and Peru. She has curated screening series of political cin-
ema and organized public engagement events as a means of returning to society her research work.

NOTES

. Author interview with Jorge Sanjinés, La Paz, August , . All interview and text
translations are mine unless stated otherwise.
. Julianne Burton, Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with
Filmmakers (Austin: University of Texas Press, ). In this volume Burton makes a
conscious effort to include women (Marta Rodríguez, Helena Solberg, and Marcela
Fernández Violante) and non-directorial roles. The compilation has been interpreted by
some (particularly younger generations of Latin American film scholars) as a canonical
list of (male) auteurs, but Burton’s commitment to women’s issues and research into
production practices is explicit throughout her work.
. This article is a first attempt to apply the methodology of production studies to the
study of Andean oppositional filmmaking. Miranda Banks, Bridget Conor, and Vicki
Mayer define production studies as the examination of “specific sites and fabrics of media
production as distinct interpretative communities, each with its own organizational
structures, professional practices, and power dynamics.” Miranda Banks, Bridget Conor,
and Vicki Mayer, Production Studies, the Sequel!: Cultural Studies of Global Media
Industries (New York: Routledge, ), x.
. Many of the protagonists of the stories I reconstruct here are either dead or
unwilling to talk about this history. They have different reasons, including the very
personal decision to avoid reopening old wounds. Nevertheless, I try to acknowledge
their voices through direct quotes whenever possible.
. Feminist film theory and criticism is considerably polarized on the issue of the
auteur. On the one hand, feminist scholars question auteurist approaches to filmmaking
and film cultures (to name just a few who influence my work: Patricia Zimmermann,
B. Ruby Rich, Julia Lesage, Catherine Grant). On the other hand, the programmatic
need to recover a genealogy of lost, forgotten, or directly erased figures—what Jane
Gaines calls a “lost-and-found approach”—has driven an effort to name and publicly
recognize the genius of female authors. Jane Gaines, “Film History and the Two
Presents of Feminist Film Theory,” Cinema Journal , no.  (). Priya Jaikumar
has established an accurate parallelism on the problematic tendency to follow auteurist
approaches both in feminist and non-Western film criticism, questioning why “despite
feminist, deconstructive, black, Third World, and anticolonial criticisms of the concept
since the s, the idea of the author and the practice of auteurist criticism have
endured in some guise.” Priya Jaikumar, “Feminist and Non-Western Interrogations of

Seguí | Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues 33

Film Authorship,” in The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, ed. Kristin Lenée
Hole, Dijana Jelaca, E. Ann Kaplan, and Patrice Petro (London and New York:
Routledge, ), . There is some justification for an investment in authorship for
feminist film theory and historiography, but it may be more useful to demystify the
figure of the director-auteur in order to expand the notion of authorship with the
political objective of uncovering and crediting obscured forms of feminized labor.
. There is an ongoing debate about the definition of Third Cinema, a term originally
proposed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their “Hacia un tercer cine”
[Toward a Third Cinema], Tricontinental  (): –. It is commonly
understood as a film practice that originated with militant cinema in the Third World
during the s and s. However, some scholars, such as Paul Willemen and Jim
Pines (Questions of Third Cinema [London: BFI, ]) and Mike Wayne (Political
Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema [London and Sterling, VA: Pluto, ]) have a
wider understanding of the term, seeing it as an emancipatory cinematic practice of
production and reception that is not dated or circumscribed to the Third World. Since
there is no academic consensus, I am not using the term to define cinematic practices
addressed in this article, although my intervention makes a contribution to the
scholarship on Third Cinema and offers another critical vision for understanding the
complexity of its practices from a feminist perspective.
. See Julianne Burton, “Film Artisans and Film Industries in Latin America,
–: Theoretical and Critical Implications of Variations in Modes of Filmic
Production and Consumption,” in New Latin American Cinema, vol. , ed. Michael T.
Martin (Detroit: Wayne University Press, ), –.
. Peru, from  to , was under a populist military regime led by General Juan
Velasco Alvarado. This progressive authoritarian government developed several policies in
alliance with the peasantry and the working class. Meanwhile, in Bolivia, the brief
progressive regime of another military leader, General Juan José Torres (–), was
followed by the fascist military regime of General Hugo Banzer (–), which
harshly retaliated against progressive sectors of the population. Conditions changed for
Bolivia when, in , after the general mobilization of the population, democracy was
restored and a period of relative peace began. During the same period, and by way of
contrast, in Peru a bloody internal conflict began in  and lasted until .
. I address some of these collaborations and mutual influences between the Cusco
School and Ukamau in Isabel Seguí, “Cine-Testimonio: Saturnino Huillca, estrella del
documental revolucionario peruano” [Cine-Testimony: Saturnino Huillca, Peruvian
Revolutionary Documentary’s Star], Cine Documental  (): –.
. Jorge Sanjinés and Grupo Ukamau, Teoría y Práctica de un cine junto al pueblo
[Theory and Practice of a Cinema with the People] (Mexico City: Siglo XXI editores,
).
. Burton, “Film Artisans and Film Industries in Latin America, –,” .
. For instance, in , during the progressive military regime of Velasco Alvarado in
Peru, Decree no. , was proclaimed for the Promotion of the Cinematographic
Industry. The government intended to foster national production through protectionist
legislation that guaranteed the obligatory theatrical exhibition of all films made by
Peruvian cinematographic companies. Thus most Peruvian filmmakers, including those

34 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018

who were anticapitalist, became entrepreneurs in order to take advantage of the law.
Despite this act, however, Peru never developed a strong film production culture and
the law was repealed in .
. Dramatic ruptures in friendships and marriages played a very important role in the
dissolution of these groups. Personal problems usually mingled with accusations of
improper economic management, and the oral histories are full of detailed accounts of
these facts—shared off the record. Yet there are some written testimonies, such as Rene
Weber, “El grupo Chaski: una película sin happy end” [The Chaski Group: A Film
without a Happy End], Butaca Sanmarquina , no.  (): –. See also Antonio
Eguino’s memoir El cine según Eguino [Cinema According to Eguino], in which the
Bolivian filmmaker makes passing reference to the problems that provoked the breaking
up of the first Ukamau group, including fights between Sanjinés and Consuelo
Saavedra during the filming of the unfinished Roads of Death [Los caminos de la
muerte]. Eguino notes: “There came a time when personal relationships were tense,
there were arguments, shouting, disagreements. There was a constant tension between
us. Jorge and his wife fought, that was the beginning of the break that came later.”
Fernando Martínez, ed., El cine según Eguino (La Paz: Bolivia Lab, ), . It is not
clear if the last sentence refers to the separation of the couple formed by Saavedra and
Sanjinés, the dissolution of the Ukamau group, or both.
. Martínez, El cine según Eguino, –.
. Ibid., .
. Author interview with Antonio Eguino, La Paz, August , .
. In countries of Hispanic culture, women do not lose their surnames when they
marry, but sometimes they take their husband’s surname using the preposition “de”
which means “of,” which is a traditional formulation.
. Danielle Caillet, “La importancia de un cine llamado Potencial-Mujer,” Imagen. La
Revista Boliviana de Cine y Video  (December –January ): –.
. The Kallawaya region is an indigenous territory in the north of Bolivia famous for
its cultural characteristics, principally traditional medicine, music, and religious ceremonies.
. Martínez, El cine según Eguino, –.
. The Sanjinés information comes from an author interview with Jorge Sanjinés,
La Paz, August , . Sanjinés and Saavedra, with their children, went into exile in
Chile in  after Banzer’s coup. After Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile in ,
Saavedra and her children were summoned to Cuba by Sanjinés, who was there
working on postproduction for The Principal Enemy, although at the time he had
already met Beatriz Palacios and was living with her. After Saavedra and Sanjinés
separated, she and her children remained on the island for five years, while Sanjinés
and Palacios moved to Ecuador to film Get Out of Here in . In , after
Banzer’s dictatorship was overthrown, Sanjinés and Palacios returned to Bolivia.
Currently, Saavedra lives in Chile.
. Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), , .
. Information about Palacios is riddled with holes. Her date of birth is commonly
cited as , but this is impossible since Sanjinés affirms that when he met her in ,
she was twenty-eight years old. I believe this to be more plausible, so her birthdate must

Seguí | Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues 35

have been around , although I don’t have any documentary evidence to prove it. Her
national identification card and passport were reissued, probably based on forged
documents, after her return to the country from exile. Additionally, some of her
acquaintances affirm that her actual first surname was Azurduy, not Palacios.
. Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, Diario ecuatoriano. Cuaderno de rodaje (Quito:
Consejo Nacional de Cinematografía de Ecuador, ).
. Ibid., .
. In every single interview that I conducted during fieldwork there has been
complete agreement about the instrumental role Palacios played in managing the
Ukamau group, and how the responsibilities for the productions were distributed
between the couple. The same description occurs in the testimonies recorded by Sergio
Estrada in his  documentary Beatriz with the People [Beatriz junto al pueblo].
. I found a document with the weekly production plan in Ukamau Foundation’s
archive. This archive is not catalogued: it is basically what remains of Palacios’s files,
with no significant additions after her death.
. See their testimonies in Estrada’s film Beatriz with the People.
. Author interview with Liliana de la Quintana, La Paz, August , . During this
conversation, Quintana informed me that in , she, Palacios, and Raquel Romero
directed together the short video The Miner Woman and the Organization [La mujer
minera y la organización]. This video constitutes one of the most interesting women’s
collaborations in Bolivian oppositional cinema, although Quintana affirms that the
documentary and their joint work was received with a mixture of suspicion and irony
by their male colleagues.
. I interviewed Barea for the first time, jointly with the cinematographer Jorge
Vignati, in Lima on August , . On that occasion I was interviewing them in
their capacity as crew members on The Principal Enemy. In September  I traveled
to Lima to undertake more fieldwork on Barea’s filmography. For one week, I
conducted several semi-structured interviews, as well as more informal conversations
with her alone. The information gathered in this section is the result of that fieldwork.
Barea’s side of the story is published here for the first time.
. French film writer Georges Sadoul gave them the name in  after the Karlovy
Vary film festival.
. Juan Zevallos Aguilar, “Kukuli y el cine andino de Luis Figueroa,” in Cine Andino,
ed. Julio Noriega Bernuy and Javier Morales Mena (Lima: Pakarina ediciones /
Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, ), .
. Gabriela Martínez, “Independent Filmmaking in the Peruvian Context,” in
Independent Filmmaking around the Globe, ed. Doris Blatruschat and Mary P. Erickson
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), .
. Author interview with María Barea, Lima, August , .
. Hill, Never Done, .
. The organization is known as ACSTHO (later IPROFOTH).
. Isabel Seguí Fuentes, “Jorge Sanjinés. Actualización Bio-Filmográfica,” Archivos de
la Filmoteca  (): –.

36 FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2018